Sir John Paul Getty, KBE (born Eugene Paul Getty; 7 September 1932 – 17 April 2003), was a wealthy American-born British philanthropist and book collector. He was the elder son of Jean Paul Getty Sr. (1892–1976), one of the richest men in the world at the time, and his wife Ann Rork. The Getty family's wealth was the result of the oil business founded by George Franklin Getty. At birth he was given the name Eugene Paul Getty, but in later life he adopted other names, including Paul Getty, John Paul Getty, Jean Paul Getty Jr., and John Paul Getty II. A long-time Anglophile,[3] he became a British citizen in 1997. In 1986, he was awarded an honorary knighthood for services to causes ranging from cricket (a sport he came to love despite his American upbringing), to art and to the Conservative Party. His honorary knighthood became substantive when he became a British citizen. In 1998 he changed his name by deed poll when he renounced the first name Eugene and wished to be known as Sir Paul Getty, KBE.[4]

His second marriage was to the Dutch actress, model and style icon Talitha Pol (stepdaughter of Augustus John's daughter Poppet) on 10 December 1966. The two posed for an iconic photograph on a roof-top in Marrakesh, Morocco in January 1969. The photo, taken by Patrick Lichfield, shows Talitha Getty crouched down leaning on a wall and her husband in the background in hood and sunglasses. The photo appeared in American Vogue and again in the September 1999 issue of American Vogue and is part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Two and a half years after the photo was taken, Talitha died of a heroin overdose on 14 July 1971. She was survived by her son with Getty: Tara Gabriel Gramophone Galaxy Getty (born June 1968), an ecological conservationist in Africa.[5]

Getty moved to Rome as head of Getty Oil Italiana. After the death of his second wife in 1971, he moved back to England and was reclusive for a time. In 1973, his eldest son, John Paul Getty III, was kidnapped in Rome by Calabrian mobsters and held in the Calabrian Mountains, chained to a stake in a cave. Getty did not have enough money to pay the $17 million ransom demand, and his father refused to help, saying "I have 14 other grandchildren, and if I pay one penny now, then I will have 14 kidnapped grandchildren." However, when one of his son's ears was delivered by mail to a newspaper in Rome (delivery had been delayed by three weeks because of a postal strike), his father finally agreed to help out with the ransom payment by making the ransom payment a loan to his son. In 1976, Getty's father died. Over the next decade Getty suffered from depression and, in 1984 in a final attempt to end his drug addiction, checked himself into a London clinic. While there he received a visit from the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to thank him for large donations to the National Gallery. She reportedly helped speed his recovery by telling him, "My dear Mr. Getty, we mustn't let things get us down, must we? We'll have you out of here as soon as possible." During a low period in the 1970s Getty had been cheered up by the former England cricketer and later President of the MCC, Gubby Allen, having previously been introduced to the game by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.[6]

^Aileen Getty is an AIDS activist formerly married to Elizabeth Taylor's son Christopher Wilding; married since 2005 to Bartolomeo Ruspoli (b 1978), son of Prince Alessandro Ruspoli. American writer/columnist Liz Smith made several mistakes in reporting the second marriage, notably that there were two Aileen Gettys and that the first one (Taylor's ex-daughter-in-law) had died, and that the bride's father had died in 1971 (he was very much alive) "Heirs Plan Secret Wedding", 26 April 2005; the New York Times mentioned the marriage in an August 2006 article

^NNDb profile for J. Paul Getty Jr. Retrieved 21 November 2007. At some point, Tara dropped his third and fourth names. In 1999, an Irish newspaper revealed that he and six other family members had been granted Irish passports and citizenship, and he was now known as Tara Gabriel Getty. In 1994, he married for the third and final time, to Victoria Holdsworth.